A full discussion of food will include the social-political and cultural aspects of the environment in which the food will be cultivated, harvested, prepared, and eaten. If our society and culture in general is messed up, our food’s quality will not escape unaffected. It is good for us to then to examine our current system, and the centralization that accompanies it.

Authority and relationships go hand in hand. Without any relationships or knowledge of the people or situation, authority will be blind and arbitrary. Without authority or rules, relationships will have an arbitrary basis (i.e. no basis) for love, faithfulness, or even clear communication. Thus only God, who alone has absolute knowledge of everything, has absolute authority over everything. And when He has a special saving relationship with a people (or person), that people is even more accountable to His authority. We, on the other hand, are limited in knowledge and relationships, and thus limited in our authority and power. While we should not be individualists, we should have an emphasis on local authority and relational power. The more centralized and impersonal the relation is, the more limited the authority should be.

From this thinking comes representative government and our Tenth Amendment. Also from this comes the vital importance of the family to society and culture. It is in the family that the relations are able to be close enough to establish what food we eat, what clothes we wear, and what music we develop. It is in the family that culture is passed on and developed.

When large institutions like Hollywood and government schools try to form culture, it ends up with cheap, impersonal Pop Culture. It affects music, dance, agriculture, communication, cooking, manufacturing, etc… While some good will usually remain in the centralized systems (like great action scenes in perverse movies), and while the centralized systems may think they are helping, they generally break apart relational and familial culture, society, and economics. Thus we get fast-food. Thus we get the processing and preserving to make food mass-marketable. Thus we get FDA raids on small farms. Thus we get most of the modern food industry.

Much can be said on how to rebuild our food system (hence True Foods Solutions), but basically it will be a return to a more local and relational system. How that is done is up for debate. How local do we mean? What can we learn from the corporations of today, and what should we throw out? How quickly ought this to happen? Etc… And neither will it be easy. Relationships are very messy. But in the work that has been put before us, so let us strive for reform, for decentralization, and for excellence.